The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

by Vincent Van Gogh

  I reproach myself now that it was I - perhaps insisting too much that you stay on here to await events and giving you so many good reasons for doing so - I reproach myself now that it was I who was perhaps the cause of your departure - unless, of course, that departure was planned beforehand? And that it was therefore perhaps up to me to show I still had the right to be kept fully in the picture.

  Be that as it may, I hope we still like each other enough to be able, if need be, to start afresh, assuming that the wolf at the door, alas ever-present for those of us artists without means, should necessitate such a measure.

  You mention a canvas of mine in your letter - Sunflowers on a yellow background - and make it plain you’d rather like to have it. I don’t think it’s altogether a bad choice - for if Jeannin can claim the peony, and Quost the hollyhock, then surely I, above all others, can lay claim to the sunflower.

  I think I’ll begin by returning what is yours,1 while observing that it is my intention, after what has happened, categorically to deny your right to the canvas in question. But since I commend your intelligence in choosing this canvas, I’ll make the effort to paint two of them exactly alike. In which case it can all be done and settled amicably so that you can have your own in the end all the same.

  I made a fresh start today on my canvas of Mme Roulin, the one in which, due to my accident, the hands had been left unfinished.2 As an arrangement of colours, the reds moving through to pure orange, building up again in the flesh tones to the chromes, passing through the pinks and blending with the olive and Veronese greens - as an impressionist arrangement of colours I have never devised anything better. And I’m sure that if one were to put this canvas just as it is in a fishing boat, even one from Iceland, there would be some among the fishermen who would feel they were there, inside the cradle.

  Ah! My dear friend, to achieve in painting what the music of Berlioz and Wagner has already done… an art that offers consolation for the broken-hearted! There are still just a few who feel it as you and I do!!!

  My brother understands you well and when he tells me that you are a poor sort of wretch like me, well, that just proves that he understands us.

  I shall send you your things, but I still have bouts of weakness at times during which I’m in no position to lift even a finger to return your things to you. In a few days’ time I’ll pluck up the courage. And as for the ‘fencing masks and gloves’ (make as little use as possible of less infantile engines of war), these terrible engines of war will just have to wait until then. I am writing to you very calmly, but packing up what’s left is still beyond me.

  In my mental or nervous fever, or madness - I am not too sure how to put it or what to call it - my thoughts sailed over many seas. I even dreamed of the phantom Dutch ship and of Le Horla, and it seems that, while thinking what the woman rocking the cradle sang to rock the sailors to sleep, I, who on other occasions cannot even sing a note, came out with an old nursery tune, something I had tried to express in an arrangement of colours before I fell ill, because I don’t know the music of Berlioz.

  It would give me great pleasure if you would write to me again soon. Have you finished reading all of Tartarin? The imagination of the south makes for friendship, believe me, and the two of us will always be friends.

  Have you read and re-read Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Beecher Stowe yet? Perhaps it’s not very well written from a literary point of view. Have you read Germinie Lacerteux yet?

  With a whole-hearted handshake,

  Ever yours,

  Vincent

  576 [F] [part]

  [3 February 1889]

  My dear Theo,

  I should have preferred to reply at once to your kind letter containing the 100 francs, but since at that precise moment I was very tired and the doctor has given me strict instructions to go out for walks and make no mental exertion, I haven’t written to you until today.

  As far as work is concerned, this month hasn’t been bad on the whole, and as the work takes my mind off things, or rather keeps me in order, I don’t deprive myself of it.

  I have done La Berceuse three times, and seeing that Mme Roulin was the model and I only the painter, I let her choose between the three, her and her husband, on condition, however, that I could do a duplicate for myself of the one she chose, which I am working on at present.

  You ask if I have read Mireille by Mistral - I am like you, I can only read the extracts that have been translated. But what about you, have you heard it yet, for perhaps you know that Gounod has set it to music. At least I think so. I don’t know the music, of course, and even if I did go to hear it, I should be watching the musicians rather than listening.

  But I can tell you this, that the local dialect spoken here sounds so musical in the mouths of the Arlesiennes that I actually pick up snatches of it every now and then.

  Perhaps there is an attempt at a medley of local colour in La Berceuse. It’s badly painted, and in a technical sense cheap chromos are infinitely better done, but even so…

  Here, the so-called worthy town of Aries is such a peculiar sort of a place that it is with good reason our friend Gauguin calls it the filthiest spot in the south. Now, if Rivet1 saw the population, he’d certainly have some bad moments, and repeat over and over again, ‘You’re in a sorry state, the lot of you,’ just as he says of us. Still, once you’ve had the local disease, you’ll never catch it again.

  Which is just to let you know that as far as I am concerned, I have no illusions about myself Things are going very, very well, and I’ll do everything the doctor says, but…

  When I came out of hospital with good old Roulin, I fancied there’d been nothing wrong with me, it was only afterwards I felt I’d been ill. Well, that’s only to be expected, I have moments when I am twisted with enthusiasm or madness or prophecy, like a Greek oracle on his tripod. I display great presence of mind then in my words, and speak like the Arl6siennes, but in spite of all that, my spirits are very low. Especially when my physical strength returns. But I’ve already told Rey that at the first sign of a serious symptom I would come back and submit myself to the alienists in Aix, or to himself.

  What else except pain and suffering can we expect if we are not well, you and I?

  Our ambition has been dashed so low. So let us work very calmly, look after ourselves as best we can, and not exhaust ourselves in futile attempts at mutual generosity. You do your duty and I will do mine, and as far as that’s concerned, we’ve both already paid for it - and not just in words - and at the end of the road we may quietly come together again. But when I am in a delirium and everything I love so much is in turmoil, then I don’t mistake that for reality, and I don’t play the false prophet.

  Indeed, illness or death holds no terror for me, but happily for us, ambition is not compatible with the callings we follow. There are so many people in all classes of society, from the highest to the lowest, who believe chat, anyway.

  But why are you thinking about your marriage contract and the possibility of dying just now? Wouldn’t it be better simply to make love to your woman instead? After all, that’s normal practice in the north, and it’s not for me to say that practices in the north are no good.

  It’ll all come all right in the end, believe me.

  But I, without a penny to my name, I still say that when it comes down to it, money is one kind of currency and painting is another. And I am even ready to send you a consignment along the lines mentioned in previous letters. And it will get better. If my strength returns.

  So, if Gauguin, who is completely infatuated with my sunflowers, takes these two pictures, I should just like him to give your fiancee or you a couple of pictures of his, not second-rate ones but better than that. And should he take a copy of La Berceuse, then all the more reason for him to give a good one in return. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to complete the series I spoke to you about, which should be fit to go on show in that same little display window we have gazed at so often.

  In this
case, the value of the pictures does not come into it, and I don’t claim to be an expert. It remains a fact, however, that I may be entitled to attach as much importance to my social position as you do to yours as a loyal employee. And let me just say this: I think as much of brotherly integrity when it comes to Boussod’s money as you do. It has never played us false. And we have sweated far too much doing good work to get annoyed at being called thieves or incompetents.

  Anyway, I won’t keep on about it.

  As for the Independants, it seems to me that six pictures are too many by half. To my mind, the Harvest and the White Orchard are enough, with the Provençale Girl or the Sower if you like. But I really don’t care. The only thing I really want to do some day is to give you a more comforting impression of this painting business of ours with a collection of about 30 more serious studies. In any case that, will prove to our real friends like Gauguin, Guillaumin, Bernard, &c, that we are producing something.

  As for the little yellow house, when I paid my rent the landlord’s agent was very kind and behaved like an Arlesien, treating me as an equal.

  So I told him that I had no need of a lease, nor of a written assurance of preference, and that in the event of my being ill payment would only be made by friendly arrangement.

  People here have their hearts in the right place and the spoken word is more binding than the written word. So I shall keep the house on for the time being, as I need to feel that this is my home if I am to regain my mental health.

  […]

  Yesterday I went to see the girl to whom I had gone when I

  was off my head. They told me that there’s nothing surprising about things like that in this part of the world. She’d been upset and had fainted but had regained her composure. And indeed, they spoke well of her.

  But it won’t do for us to think that I am completely sane. The people from round here who are ill like me have told me the truth. You can be old or young, but there will always be times when you take leave of your senses.

  So I don’t ask you to tell people that there is nothing wrong with me, or that there never will be. It is just that the explanation of all this is probably not Ricord’s but Raspail’s.2 Though I have not yet had the fevers of the region, I might still catch them. But they already know a thing or two about all that here at the hospital, and as long as you have no false shame and say frankly how you feel, you cannot go wrong.

  I am bringing this letter to a close for this evening with a good handshake in my thoughts,

  Ever yours, Vincent

  On 17 February Van Gogh was discharged from hospital, but continued to eat and sleep there for the time being. The people of Aries saw his return to the town as a threat and, following a petition, the mayor ordered him to be locked up for a month in an isolation cell in the hospital, while the police sealed the Yellow House. Even so, Vincent reassured Theo, ‘As far as I can judge I am not really mad. You will see that the canvases I’ve done in the meantime are untroubled and no worse than the others.’ His spirits were raised by a visit from his faithful friend, the painter Paul Signac, on 23 March. Together they went to the Yellow House and poked fun at the gendarmes.

  At the end of March Van Gogh started to paint again, having by then reached the fifth version of his La Berceuse. With a show of modesty, he claimed again that all he was trying to achieve was the effect of ‘a cheap chromo’, the kind of picture ‘a sailor who cannot paint might imagine when, out at sea, he thinks of his wife ashore’.

  At the beginning of April, Van Gogh resumed his work on orchards in blossom, which he had been forced to abandon the year before because of the change in the weather. However, he felt disoriented, and, seemingly unable to organize his life properly, he shrank from setting up a new studio on his own. For the first time, he mooted the plan to Theo of going to the asylum in nearby Saint-Rimy as a precautionary measure. He assessed his condition very soberly: ‘What comforts me is that I am beginning to look upon madness as a disease like any other and to accept it as such.’

  His last letters from Aries understandably focus on his health. He found it beneficial to abide by the rules of the hospital because ‘I have become timid and hesitant, and live, as it were, mechanically’. He guessed that the possible cause of his attack had been drink and perhaps tobacco as well, though he was quite unable to give up either: ‘Each day I take the medicine that the incomparable Dickens prescribes against suicide. It consists of a glass of wine, a piece of bread and cheese and a pipe of tobacco.’ The idea of suicide as an escape from his precarious existence crops up in various guises in his letters. However, Theo’s support had saved him from that fatal step, or so he reassured his anxious brother. He drew comfort from the poetic view that diseases are to man what ivy is to the oak. In a letter to his sister Wil, who was nursing an elderly cancer patient, he wrote, ‘Ivy favours old willows without branches - each spring the ivy seeks out the trunk of an old oak - and that is just how it is with cancer, that mysterious plant which so often fastens on to people whose lives were nothing but love and devotion.’

  Although Theo tried to reassure his brother, and implored him not to worry about money, certainly not now when Theo had had a successful year, Van Gogh himself felt crushed ‘by a feeling of guilt and inadequacy’ when he thought of the money painting cost, adding that ‘it would be a good thing if this came to a stop’. To find a way out of the impasse, he even gave serious consideration to the possibility of enlisting in the Foreign Legion, an idea Theo naturally rejected out of hand. However, Theo did see merit in Vincent’s plan to move to Saint-Remy.

  While Theo was holding an exhibition of Monet’s work in his Parisian gallery, Van Gogh, in his attempts to regain his artistic footing, harked back to the masters he had admired before Impressionism and whom in his heart of hearts he had always held most dear, Millet chief amongst them: ‘Sometimes I regret that I didn’t simply keep to the Dutch palette with its grey tones, and brush away at landscapes in Montmartre.’ True, he would always’[…] preserve a certain passion for impressionism, but I feel I’m increasingly reverting to the ideas I had before I went to Paris […]. Of course, the progress of colour is an undeniable fact, precisely because of the impressionists, even when they lose their way. But Delacroix was more perfect than they.’

  588 [F]

  [30 April 1889]

  My dear Theo,

  On the occasion of the first of May1 I wish you a tolerably good year, and above all good health.

  How I should like to pass on to you some of my physical strength, I have the feeling I’ve too much of it at the moment. Which does not prevent my head from still not being all that it should be.

  How right Delacroix was, who lived on bread and wine alone, and who succeeded in finding a way of life in keeping with his vocation. But the inevitable question of money is ever-present -Delacroix had private means. Corot too. And Millet - Millet was a peasant and the son of a peasant.

  You may perhaps be interested in reading this article I cut out of a Marseilles paper because one catches a glimpse of Monticelli in it, and I find the description of the painting representing a corner of the churchyard very interesting. But alas, it’s yet another deplorable story.

  How sad it is to think that a painter who succeeds, even if only in part, pulls along half a dozen artists who are worse failures than himself

  However, remember Pangloss, remember Bouvard et P6cuchet - I do - and even that becomes clear then. But perhaps those people don’t know Pangloss, or else, fatally marked by real despair and great suffering, they have forgotten all they knew about him.

  And anyway, we are falling back again in the name of optimism on a religion that strikes me as the rear end of some sort of Buddhism. No harm in that, on the contrary, if that’s what one wants.

  I don’t like the article on Monet in the Figaro very much - how much better that other article in the 19™ Siécle was! One could see the pictures in that, and this one is full of nothing but depressing banalities.
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br />   Today I am in the middle of packing a case of pictures and studies. I’ve stuck some newspapers on to one which is flaking - it’s one of the best, and I think that when you’ve had a look at it you’ll understand more clearly what my studio, now come to grief, could have been. This study, just like some of the others, was spoiled by the damp while I was ill.

  The flood water came up to within a stone’s throw of the house, and more important, since the house wasn’t heated during my absence, by the time I got back water and saltpetre were oozing from the walls.

  That was a blow for me, since not only the studio had come to grief, but even the studies that would have been reminders of it. It is all so final, and my urge to found something very simple but lasting was so strong. I was fighting a losing battle, or rather it was weakness of character on my part, for I am left with feelings of deep remorse about it, difficult to describe. I think that was the reason I cried out so much during the attacks – I wanted to defend myself and couldn’t do it. For it was not to me, it was precisely to painters such as the poor wretch about whom the enclosed article speaks that the studio could have been of use.

  In fact, we had several predecessors. Bruyas at Montpellier gave a whole fortune to that, a whole life, and without the slightest apparent result.

  Yes - a chilly room in the municipal gallery where you can see a troubled face and many fine pictures, where you certainly feel moved, but, alas, moved as in a graveyard.

  Yet it would be difficult to walk through a graveyard that demonstrated more clearly the existence of that Esp6rance which Puvis de Chavannes has painted.

  Pictures fade like flowers - even some of Delacroix’s have suffered in this way, the magnificent Daniel, Les odalisques (quite different from those in the Louvre, it was in a single range of purplish-blue), but how they impressed me, those pictures fading there, little understood, that’s for sure, by most of the visitors who look at Courbet and Cabanel and Victor Giraud, &c.